19

 

Moscow, Russia

The news was much better than he could have believed. Andrei Rowan did not believe in luck, but he was glad to see so many world events moving in his direction—and so many situations bending to his will.

World leaders had badly misjudged the Russian prime minister for years. Dismissed by the global press as an overly ambitious, intellectual lightweight who’d been in the right place at the right time to jump to the very pinnacle of Russian politics, the truth was that Rowan was much closer to the likes of Stalin or Lenin than even his allies knew. His critics misjudged his aspirations to greatness at their own peril.

Prime Minister Rowan had carefully plotted Russia’s return to superpower status for a very long time. Every move, from the grand to the mundane, had Russia’s return to greatness firmly at the center. Rowan believed, quite passionately, that the fall of the former Soviet Union was the greatest tragedy of the twentieth century. He meant to right that wrong.

Rowan felt he truly represented the world’s best hope of checkmating the rich, imperialistic overlords who controlled so much wealth in countries like the United States. The concepts and tenets of Marxism were personal for Rowan. He believed them utterly and completely.

If Russia did not serve as a hedge against the wealthy superpowers like America that operated across the globe with impunity, who would?

China might one day be able to counter the US in raw innovation and power—but not for at least another decade. The Chinese were still churning out a thousand engineers every year just to keep pace with the one or two engineers trained at US higher education institutions capable of creating, developing, and assembling engines of innovation. The Chinese were literally throwing massive numbers of bodies at social, economic, and scientific problems, knowing that 99 percent would fail. The Chinese society inched forward based on the small numbers who achieved in spite of the hurdles before them.

Rowan, though, had adopted a hybrid philosophy—mix in a little capitalism, a little Western-style education and democracy, and then overlay it with the historic Russian command and control system, a strong military, and a world-class intelligence network.

He was taking the best of the lessons the West had learned and mixing those in with the true ideals of the communist state. Build and inspire where you can, but take what you must.

Rowan was willing to make any deal, with any partner, that suited his grand purpose. Russia would return to its former glory. There was no question at all about his future success.

Russia’s recent venture in Israel was a wonderful example. What could have been an unmitigated disaster for the Russian economy was rapidly turning into an intelligence and diplomatic success story. Even as the world’s oil economy teetered and swayed toward chaos, Rowan believed Russia had at last found a viable path forward.

Russia depended heavily on oil but often relied on the good graces of unstable Middle Eastern partners in Iran, Saudi Arabia, and elsewhere. Rowan had made a series of moves over the years to seize control of the oil companies in Russia and bring them under his control. To set an iron example for the others, he’d presented the largest private oil company in Russia, Kosvo Oil, with a tax bill of $27 billion in 2003, declared it bankrupt, and then sold its assets to other firms.

Even though Russia’s oil and gas industry was quite large, it was faced with enormous challenges. Though it had the largest reserves of natural gas in the world, the second largest coal reserves, and significant oil reserves, it was badly in need of massive investments to unlock those reserves. It produced a tenth of the world’s oil, yet also consumed a vast amount as well.

Rowan had done his best to spread the wealth among the remaining state-owned oil, gas, and pipeline companies. But his latest move to position Russia at the cusp of the greatest explosion of oil extraction the world had ever seen was, he believed, the final chess move that would return his country to its former greatness.

Then his intelligence chiefs at the SVR had delivered precise information stolen from the world’s largest private oil company on breakthrough technology to efficiently extract oil from shale.

The technology—designed to safely and cheaply super-heat the shale, forcing the oil to rise to the surface—was shockingly workable. It had no environmental side effects. No oil leaked into the surrounding environment. There was actually a net surplus of water, which had always been the major stumbling block in previous efforts to extract oil from shale.

And now, Rowan hoped, he was about to hear good news from his top aide on his return from Israel.

There was a knock on the door to his private study, away from the prying eyes and ears of the Duma. “Mr. Prime Minister?” his aide, Nicolai Petrov, called from the doorway.

“You’ve returned, signatures in hand?” Rowan answered.

Petrov stepped through the doorway. “I have. The papers have been filed with the Ministry of Infrastructures in Jerusalem.”

“INOC’s leaders are happy with our investment?”

“They are.”

“And they are willing to work with us in the basin, on this new technology?”

“They are.” Petrov paused. “But Mr. Prime Minister, there is potential conflict we’ll need to work through.”

“Which is?”

“We have competition.”

“We’ve stolen what we need,” Rowan said, laughing. “We don’t need to worry about them. I’ve already given the research to our own companies. They’ve assured me that they can create a working oil shale manufacturing facility within two years. We already have the working schematics for it in the Negev. And we have what we need in our partnership with INOC… .”

“No, it’s not any of that,” Petrov said uneasily.

“Then what?”

“It’s Israel Energy Research.”

Rowan glared at his top aide. “They’re a glorified think tank. And they’re not even Israeli to speak of, despite their name. So?”

“Their chief geologist just gave a talk in the United States at the yearly symposium of the Colorado School of Mines. He released their own assessment and presented data that the oil shale reserves at Shfela Basin near Jerusalem were the equivalent of 250 billion barrels of oil. That’s roughly the same amount of proven reserves in Saudi Arabia.”

“Again—so? It’s an academic researcher, talking hypothetically about oil shale,” Rowan said. “People have been talking about this for decades, and no one has taken them seriously.”

“Maybe, but when you combine this with the US Geological Survey data showing that the Tamar and Leviathan natural gas fields off the coast of Haifa in the Levant Basin may hold as much as two hundred trillion cubic feet, people are starting to pay attention. There’s speculation that, between the oil shale and the natural gas fields off its coast, Israel is about to become a world oil superpower.”

Rowan thumped his hand on the table. “Idle speculation,” he said, his voice rising. “They haven’t extracted any natural gas yet. We have nearly that much in our own reserves here. And no one is taking the Levant Basin gas reserves and oil shale extraction technology story seriously—other than us.”

Petrov waited a moment before continuing. He did not like to anger his boss. “That’s not entirely the case…”

“Enlighten me.”

“Well, Greece, for one, is actively talking to Israel about building out a transportation hub that would carry natural gas from the Tamar and Leviathan fields off the coast of Israel and distribute it throughout all of Europe. Greece is also talking about undersea pipelines that would carry the gas to Europe from the Eastern Mediterranean. That would seriously change the political situation in Europe.”

“Fine. But it’s still talk.”

Petrov took a deep breath and forged ahead. “Yes, but Israel Energy Research says it will have hard numbers and research on the true dimension of Israel’s undersea natural gas and oil shale deposits in the next few months. This won’t be a secret much longer…”

“Which is why we are moving so quickly with INOC and the Israeli government partnership,” Rowan said quickly. “We’re there first.”

“But we aren’t,” Petrov said anxiously. “Their chief scientist has also just said publicly that they have the same oil extraction technology that we do, perhaps even better. And I must remind you, Israel Energy Research is actually owned by the American telecom IBC group—”

“Which has nothing to do with oil and gas exploration.”

“But their subsidiary, Aladdin Oil & Gas, does. It’s a division of IBC. Israel Energy is run by Aladdin. And two very serious investors— two of the wealthiest men in the world—showed up in the past day. They took a ten percent stake in Aladdin—and seats on its board.”

“Who?” Rowan asked, afraid of the answer.

“Joseph Rothman, the chairman of Vienna Financial, the world’s largest network of banks and financial institutions, and K. Robert Moorhead, the chairman of Wolf Corp., the world’s largest media empire. And for good measure, they also put Charles Raney, the former American vice president, on their board. Israel Energy and Aladdin are now very serious players. This is formidable competition.”

“But still American, at the end of the day,” Rowan said. “Which means our partnership with Israel’s National Oil Company is even more central than we’d planned. We need to get to the Shfela Basin first, before the Americans. We must get there first. Our future depends on it.”